Can you create biological insight on a laptop? If you could, it might overturn a fundamental paradigm of drug discovery: that it takes a great scientist or team of scientists to find a clear path through the messy complexity of biology. In the conventional model, sometimes the scientist is at a university. Other times she is in a company. But always, always, there is a series of iterative interactions – scientist running experiments in lab, scientist struggling to interpret results, scientist designing new experiments, scientist analyzing new results – until biological insight arises. If it ever does.

Of course, many drug discovery advances over the past thirty years have been driven by technological innovation: combinatorial chemistry; high-throughput screening; vastly improved imaging and prediction software; and rapid and reproducible assays run in some cases by robots on groups of cells or even individual cells leading to large and hopefully meaningful datasets.

But none of these advances has replaced the “Aha” moment of insight that arises from a human being’s engagement with a biological phenomenon that is thorny or one that had not even been perceived to exist. I always expected – and still do expect – to find that kind of insight in labs, not on laptops.